journalist, author, and editor based in New York City, who grew up in Sweden and New York.

Tag: Liam Scheff

I had not listened to this before. I am extremely grateful he left behind so many spoken word pieces, like this one, through which he lives on.

The way Liam channelled the whole “story,” and everybody in it, and all the angles of the trap, all the countless attacks, and all the ways in which they have blocked all the exits–was powerful and original.

What is evil?

I like what Andre Tarkovsky wrote, in “The Sacrifice:”

“Evil is everything that is not necessary.”

It may at first sound laconic but it is actually a perfect definition of evil.

Liam Scheff has passed away, after a long battle with extreme nerve damage (tinnitus)–described here,leaving his many fans, readers, followers, and friends bereft. He’d been mourning the loss of the love of his life, Helen, for many years, who died suddenly in 2010.

I had, like many, recent exchanges with Liam, in which death was openly discussed, and I was fairly good about refraining from imposing useless or banal advice on my suffering friend. Nothing makes people feel more lonely than the feeling that the person they are addressing can’t quite hear what they are saying. Including when they are saying they are ready to die, because living is too excruciatingly painful. (Not psychically–physically, in this case.)

Liam addressed that in his farewell letter, linked above, so I don’t have to run the risk of a ham-fisted or cloying effort to represent it.

If I were to be dead, I would want somebody to bring up my best work.

Liam was both one of the most penetrating, fearless, investigative reporters of our time and one of the funniest YouTube satirists of fake science (I’ll post some of these later.)

He broke a story that was bigger, darker, more devastating, I think, than anything any of us ever broke (proved) before or since, on HIV/AIDS. It came to be known as “Guinea Pig Kids.”

I am a little unclear on whether it was 2002 or 2003 that Christine Maggiore first connected me with Liam Scheff, but when she did, it was because she had found out about a story that Liam then went after like a Tomahawk Missile–emerging with smoking gun evidence that got parlayed into several articles, got picked up by other reporters, and even became a BBC documentary.

Christine deserves the credit for making initial contact with the story, and Liam did the absolutely unparalleled penetrative, undercover investigative reporting that blew it wide open, locally, (here in New York City, nationally, and internationally.